May Lacy

May Lacy was an Irish woman who worked as a typist at the British

Biography
May Lacy was born in County Cork, Ireland, and she worked as a theatre actress in Dublin during the 1900s, performing alongside Elizabeth Butler and Frances O'Flaherty. During World War I, the three of them became involved with the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood. Lacy worked as a secretary at Dublin Castle, where she worked for the British civil servant Charles Hammond, with whom she started an affair (despite him being married). On 18 April 1916, O'Flaherty asked Lacy to procure a document containing orders from Under-Secretary Matthew Nathan to arrest several Irish Volunteers and Sinn Fein members, hoping to publish it and encourage the Volunteers to support an uprising. Lacy was reluctant to do so, as she had taken an oath and was in love with Hammond, and she declined. However, after she was brokenhearted by Vanessa Hammond's return to stay with her husband in Dublin, Lacy was persuaded to steal the document and deliver it to Frances. She later grew regretful after finding out that O'Flaherty planned to use it to ignite an uprising against the British, and she also grew worried after she began to show signs of pregnancy from her affair with Hammond.